A family from Peckham trapped in an ‘unsellable’ shared ownership flat due to fire safety flaws has lent their voice to a film, projected onto the Houses of Parliament, highlighting the human cost of the cladding scandal.
Michelle Delgado, who lives with her partner and son in a one-bed flat in Cooperative House, first featured in this newspaper last month, describing how “you have more protection when you buy kitchen appliances than when you buy a flat’, and saying her home now feels like ‘a prison’.
The film, created by the End our Cladding Scandal campaign, highlights how shared owners and leaseholders are being left in limbo by remediation delays and debate over who pays for essential fire safety improvements.
Millions of UK residents are innocent victims of the #BuildingSafetyCrisis
Last night, we shared this film projection onto the Houses of Parliament.
Please share. Please make sure our voices are heard.#WeAreTrapped #EndOurCladdingScandal pic.twitter.com/WkfsXjHkMS
— End Our Cladding Scandal (@EOCS_Official) June 9, 2021
The group is putting pressure on the government to step in and fully fund remediation and help speed up the huge backlog. A combination of uncertainty over funding and a shortage of surveyors and fears over their liability have raised doubts that cladding and fire safety issues across the country will be resolved in years – if not decades.
The group is part of a nationwide campaign aiming to march through central London in September, after being postponed from July, in protest at the government’s response. They are demanding residents are protected from unsafe housing and escalating costs for fixing building defects.